The Times’ ideological bias was on display once more in how it reported on a private memo sent by Admiral Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, to his staff in April 2009, affirming that “enhanced techniques” banned by the Obama White House had in fact yielded important information. “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Admiral Blair had written. This disclosure had significant news value, since Blair was not a Bush appointee, and he had sent his memo, according to the Times reporter Peter Baker, “on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of interrogation methods that the Obama White House has deemed to be illegal torture.”
Baker’s story on the memo, headlined “Banned Techniques Yielded ‘High Value Information,’ Memo Says,” ran on April 22, but only at 850 words and only on the Times website. Two paragraphs of the bombshell online report were shoehorned into a larger story that ran inside the paper with another reporter’s byline, under a headline that reflected nothing pertaining to what Baker had reported (“Obama Won’t Bar Inquiry of Penalty on Interrogations,” by Sheryl Gay Stolberg).
Byron York of the Washington Examiner interviewed the Times’ deputy Washington bureau chief, Richard Stevenson, and asked why Baker’s story did not run in the newspaper itself. According to York, Stevenson denied any ideological motivation and blamed deadline pressure and a surfeit of meaty news stories that day.
September 11 left an indelible mark on the American psyche and American politics, animating both the War on Terror as an intellectual construct and the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like December 7, it will always, for most Americans, be a day to remember, and to remember in a particular way. Yet it is not obvious that such is also the case at the New York Times. Only three years after this national tragedy, the Times began nibbling away at its meaning, and since then it has produced a dismissive piece on almost every anniversary of 9/11. Walter Kirn launched the trend on September 12, 2004, in a Times Magazine essay titled “Forget It?” If 9/11 is mostly a way for politicians to manipulate our souls and psyches, Kirn wrote, “Maybe it’s time to move on.”
In May 2005, Frank Rich wrote “Ground Zero Is So Over.” The vacant site, the focus of squabbling over what to rebuild, is a poor memorial for those who died there, Rich charged, “but it’s an all too apt symbol for a war on which the country is turning its back.” Families of the fallen may not “have turned the page,” but other Americans had. As the anniversary neared in August 2006, Rich wrote a column presenting 9/11 as synonymous with a White House effort to “exploit terrorism for political gain.”
There was more of the same in a report by N. R. Kleinfield on the anniversary in 2007, headlined “As 9-11 Draws Near, a Debate Rises: How Much Tribute Is Enough?” Kleinfield wrote, “Each year, murmuring about Sept. 11 fatigue arises, a weariness of reliving a day that everyone wishes had never happened.... By now, though, many people feel that the collective commemorations, publicly staged, are excessive and vacant, even annoying.”
In March 2009, David Dunlap reported on the debate to abandon the name “Freedom Tower” for whatever structure eventually goes up at Ground Zero. “That there is a debate at all,” Dunlap wrote in a snappish vein, “suggests how much has changed since the first years after 9/11, when no official pronouncement was complete without an assurance that the attacks, the victims, the rescuers and the survivors would never be forgotten; and when any use of patriotic motifs seemed to be beyond public reproach, no matter how cynical or sentimental.”
Most telling about the Times’ view of our wars, and about its patriotism, was a very small piece published in 2007 the day after that year’s 9/11 commemoration, just as the surge was gaining momentum in Iraq. Writing about General David Petraeus’s hometown of Cornwall-on-Hudson, Paul Vitello reported that “Some said they were aghast at the dimensions of the problem, some awed by General Petraeus’s seeming grasp of the wildly irregular forces in play; but almost none seemed to foresee a happy result for ‘our side,’ as many in this conservative, Republican-voting place put it.”
Our side in quotation marks. This expression of internal exile from America said it all. For the Times, “our side” was actually “their side,” a foreign place where patriotic Americans lived and which the Times had chosen to see as hostile ground.
ten
Conclusion
The ghost of Abe Rosenthal, made unquiet by the contrast between the legacy he left behind and the politicized agenda pursued by Sulzberger Jr., continued to haunt the Times in the ensuing years—which even the paper’s most ardent defenders had to admit were marked by an aura of decline and fall. Rosenthal had foreseen most of the problems that were in store for the institution to which he had devoted his life. Were he still alive, it is hard to imagine that he would not be feeling a twinge of Schadenfreude over the Times’ current predicament. But being a fierce loyalist, he also would probably feel ashamed that the paper he strove to keep “straight” had embraced so many dubious multicultural nostrums and drifted so far to the left that on some days it read like a broadsheet version of the Nation. Rosenthal would also hate the idea of the Times airing its institutional problems so publicly. This, after all, was a man who fought to keep the corrections column as unnoticed as possible and resisted the creation of a public editor long after others in the news industry had adopted one. And unlike the kinder, gentler newsroom that Sulzberger has encouraged, where few seem to suffer for their errors, Rosenthal certainly made transgressors feel his wrath. Some walked the plank; others endured internal exile to some obscure career Siberia.
In Rosenthal’s era, Times editors could say with some confidence, “We’re not the story. The story is the story.” By 2010 this would no longer be the case. The egregiousness of the Jayson Blair scandal, along with a string of other institutional humiliations that followed, made that old certitude impossible to sustain as the paper’s internal chaos itself became news fit to print.
So the Times entered a cycle in which error caused by its political commitments was followed by fevered public contrition and promises of amendment delivered publicly through “Notes to Readers,” public editor’s columns and long editorial mea culpas, often on the front page, explaining how and why the paper committed the journalistic sin for which it needed to apologize. This cycle of real and pretended remorse was also marked by the announcement of newsroom reforms and personnel changes designed to rehabilitate the paper’s credibility and reputation, and to head off more scandal and embarrassment by encouraging, as one internal report put it, “transparency” and “accountability.”
Yet much like the addict who pledges sobriety but can’t follow through, the Times falls off the wagon regularly. The newsroom reforms either have not been implemented in the way they were designed, or have been ineffectual, undercut by inertia, obduracy, denial, a persisting sense of institutional entitlement and a fundamental failure to get at the root causes of its dysfunction. Also, the paper has been willing to change in every respect except one: the tone of superiority, the leftish partisanship and embrace of countercultural values, all of which have been hallmarks of the Arthur Jr. regime.
One change that seemed to hold great promise was the appointment of Bill Keller as editor in chief in 2004. Keller came across as more open to outside criticism, especially from conservatives. In an interview with Nick Lemann of the New Yorker in 2005, he seemed to validate many of their complaints. “Conservatives feel estranged because they feel excluded,” he acknowledged. “They do not always see themselves portrayed in the mainstream press as three-dimensional humans, and they don’t see their ideas taken seriously or treated respectfully.”
The spasm of institutional introspection, suffused with what appeared to be a genuine willingness to embrace more varied political perspectives, led to the creation of a special “conserv
ative beat” in January 2004, with David Kirkpatrick in the D.C. bureau the first to cover it. The goals of this new beat were to identify the “thinkers” of the conservative movement, describe “the grassroots they organize” and explore “how the conservative movement works to be heard in Washington,” as Keller later put it. The plan was not only to cover conservatives and their ideas, but to make these ideas explicable to Times editors. Kirkpatrick’s beat was discontinued in 2007, however, setting the paper up for the fall it took over its inattentiveness to stories such as the revelations of ACORN corruption in 2009, which seemed to exemplify the paper’s political tunnel vision.
The longer Keller stayed at the helm, the more thin-skinned and sarcastic he grew toward the conservative critique. Even in the New Yorker interview where he had acknowledged some grounds for conservative complaint, he also condescendingly claimed that the idea of “the liberal press” was a concept manufactured for political gain. And while many thought Keller would lead the paper in a less partisan direction, the reality was a shrill and intractable hostility to the Bush White House. The impetus for the attacks may have come from middle-line editors, but the charge was led by Keller himself. In a New York magazine profile headlined “The United States of America vs. Bill Keller,” he accused the Bush administration of whipping up “a partisan hatefest” against the Times, which had “really pissed him off.” At a New Yorker panel discussion in October 2008, Keller was asked about the McCain campaign’s attacks on the Times regarding the lobbyist/mistress story. He defiantly (and childishly) replied, “my first tendency when they do that is to find the toughest McCain story we’ve got and put it on the front page just to show that they can’t get away with it.”
Another reform that seemed to have promise was the creation of a public editor—a readers’ advocate or ombudsman, as other news organizations defined the role. The Times had historically resisted creating one, Keller said in a note to the staff, worrying that “it would foster nit-picking and navel-gazing, that it might undermine staff morale and, worst of all, that it would absolve other editors of their responsibility to represent the interests of readers.” Yet Daniel Okrent, who became the first public editor, defined the job in radically different terms, indicating that there was a crying need to provide “transparency to readers about how and why the Times does what it does.”
During his tenure, from December 2003 to May 2005, Okrent issued sage and penetrating critiques of his own paper. People on the right who hated the Times were nonetheless “as much a constituency as anyone else,” he thought. “Closing one’s ears to the complaints of partisans would also entail closing one’s mind to the substance of their arguments.” To many, Okrent’s most important achievement was affirming the criticism that had brought withering scorn from the paper—that it had a bias toward the cultural left. Those who thought the Times played it down the middle on controversial social issues, he said, were “reading the paper with [their] eyes closed.”
For saying this, Okrent took his lumps from Times reporters and editors—confirming I. F. Stone’s insight that “persuading others to virtue is an unendearing profession,” he remarked. When Okrent left, he wrote of his “18 months of bruised feelings, offended egos, pissed off editors and infuriated writers.” Some reporters and editors simply refused to cooperate with him, such as Joe Sexton, editor of the Metro section, who thought the creation of the public editor position was a “profound mistake,” says Okrent. Another antagonist was Katherine Roberts, editor of the Week in Review, who thought some of Okrent’s questions were doltish and his columns, which appeared in her section, too long.
Okrent’s successor, Byron Calame, got his share of guff too. When he corrected Alessandra Stanley’s claim that Geraldo Rivera had “nudged” a Hurricane Katrina rescue worker out of the way so he could showboat for the Fox News cameras, Stanley acidly told Women’s Wear Daily that Calame was like Kenneth Starr, except that “what he was writing about isn’t a presidency. It’s spelling and ellipses and semicolons.” Stanley was a fine one to belittle Calame. In 2005 her correction rate was so bad that editors assigned her a personal fact-checker. Clark Hoyt, the third public editor, had to deal with some attitude as well. In his farewell column in June 2010, he wrote, “On my first day on the job, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, sat opposite me in a little room off his office, clapped his hands on his knees and said with a laugh: ‘Well, you’re here. You must be dumber than you look.’”
Another newsroom reform was the creation in 2006 of a “standards editor” who would coordinate journalistic practices and ethical guidelines involved in all Times newsgathering operations. This involved supervising the overhaul of policies governing the use of confidential and anonymous sources—the use and misuse of which had gotten the paper into so much trouble during the Jayson Blair scandal. A confidential source could now be cited in the paper, the new guidelines said, only if at least one editor knew the source’s name. These policies were further strengthened after source-related problems surfaced in Judith Miller’s reporting on WMDs and in Plamegate. No one at the Times, not Sulzberger, not Keller, knew Miller’s Plamegate source—a situation that the former Rosenthal acolyte Pranay Gupte told me would never have happened when Abe was in charge. Putting some teeth back into the anonymous-sourcing policy would, executives hoped, get more information “on the record” and provide a fuller sense of the motivation of sources in offering information without identifying themselves—in essence, why they were entitled to speak from the shadows.
Yet these lofty ideals were discarded the moment the Times got a chance to publish what it regarded as a killing blow to John McCain’s presidential candidacy, with a story about his “mistress” based on a number of unidentified sources. The paper violated its own policy again a few months later when it ran a “blind” story about Caroline Kennedy’s nanny and tax problems as she was being considered to fill Hillary Clinton’s vacated Senate seat for New York. It was later disclosed that these issues were old and minor, and were part of a smear campaign engineered from the office of New York’s governor, David Paterson. During this episode, the paper got hoaxed in a letter to the editor by someone claiming to be Bertrand Delanoe, the mayor of Paris, saying that Caroline Kennedy had “no qualification whatsoever” to be a senator. Her appointment would be wholly “dynastic,” representing a “drifting away from a truly democratic model.” The “mayor” concluded: “Can we speak of American decline?”
Other hoaxes, also originating in reliance on dubious sources, occurred on April Fool’s Day, 2010. David Goodman, a Times staff blogger, ran with a claim by a legal blogger named Eric Turkewitz that he had been appointed the official White House legal blogger. Turkewitz later said he was hoping to catch fast-and-loose political bloggers, but instead suckered “the vaunted New York Times.” The same day, Andy Newman relied on a source who was an occasional Times guest blogger for a story about a theater troupe planning a project involving more than a thousand people riding the subway nude from the waist down. The event turned out to be completely fallacious.
The paper also announced that it was going to be more watchful and more punitive about plagiarism. But when Maureen Dowd cribbed material verbatim from the Talking Points blogger Josh Marshall, in a May 2009 column bashing Dick Cheney’s defense of what Dowd called “torture,” she didn’t even get a wrist-slap.
The admissions of error and resolutions to improve kept rolling in. A 2005 report titled “Preserving Our Readers’ Trust,” produced by what was called the “Credibility Committee,” said that Times news coverage needed to “embrace unorthodox views and contrarian opinions and to portray lives both more radical and more conservative than those most of us experience.” The paper also needed to “listen carefully to colleagues who are at home in realms that are not familiar to most of us,” especially religion. The Times should strive to create a climate in which staff members feel free to “propose or criticize coverage from vantage points that lie outside the perceived ne
wsroom consensus.” And it should “encourage more reporting from the middle of the country, from exurbs and hinterland, and more coverage of social, demographic, cultural and lifestyle issues.”
The committee also recommended an expansion in the diversity of the hires it made, with an accent on more conservative journalists: “Both inside and outside the paper, some people feel that [the Times is] missing stories because our staff lacks diversity in viewpoints, intellectual grounding and individual backgrounds. We should look for all manner of diversity. We should seek talented journalists who happen to have military experience, who know rural America first hand, who are at home in different faiths.” Likewise, Bill Keller told an interviewer that he wished for “more journalists with military experience, more from rural upbringings, more who grew up in evangelical churches.” In a 2005 column headlined “A Slap in the Face,” Nick Kristof warned that the Times, and American journalism generally, could wind up on the wrong side of history if it didn’t correct a failure to hire “red state evangelicals” and people who knew a “12 gauge from an AR-15.”
Yet talk was cheap and intended only for the ears of those outside the organization who had loosed a crescendo of criticism on the paper’s political and cultural bias. Liberals continued to dominate hiring and to set the tone of the newsroom, encouraging what the 2005 Pew report on media trends called “liberal groupthink.” While the Times readily hired young journalists from the Washington Monthly, the American Prospect and other liberal farm teams, as well as the sons and daughters of well-connected members of liberal New York café society, it did not recruit from National Review or the Weekly Standard.
Those few with conservative opinions or life experience who did get recruited—along with their “nonstandard narrative,” as some at the Times put it—told Okrent that “they were constantly made aware of their differences, much as black and Hispanic journalists I [Okrent] have known have experienced a persistent feeling of separateness from many of their white colleagues, not because of any racism but simply because of the dissimilarities in their backgrounds, and in the specific perspective they bring to their work because of that background.”
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